Jody Ewing at her home in Onawa on Thursday, June 25. Ewing is the founder of Iowa Cold Cases, a website dedicated to cold cases around the state. Brian Powers/The Register

Jody Ewing opens a letter from someone asking for her help on a cold case at her home in Onawa on Thursday, June 25. Ewing receives countless letters and emails a day asking for help. Brian Powers/The Register

•••

She was writing book reviews for a Sioux City newspaper, which even 10
years ago wasn’t considered eye-grabbing material for the masses. An
editor asked her to take on a series of cold cases — unsolved murders —
the kind you see on TV shows. People love that stuff.

Julia Benning lived on a farm near Clarksville, but she wanted to
experience the wider world. She had pen pals in Michigan and Scotland
and shared with them her righteous rants about small-minded prejudices
against black people, Indians and young women who spoke their mind and
didn’t conform in dress or behavior.

West Des Moines police say they are no closer today to solving the
mysterious slaying of Ashley Okland, a 27-year-old real-estate agent
whose shooting death four years ago in a model townhouse made national
news.

He was an Iowa minister heading to fish on the banks of the Missouri
River after running an errand for a mental health care facility. But the
Rev. Kevin Lane Morse’s life came to a sudden, tragic end on June 20,
2002 — mysteriously shot and left to die.

She was writing book reviews for a Sioux City newspaper, which even 10
years ago wasn’t considered eye-grabbing material for the masses. An
editor asked her to take on a series of cold cases — unsolved murders —
the kind you see on TV shows. People love that stuff.

It’s one of those movie scenes you know even if you’ve never actually
seen the movie — a young Dustin Hoffman is taken aside in “The Graduate”
and given some career advice by a middle-aged man in a business suit.

After 23 years of being a cop at the halfway point between New York City
and Boston, there’s something therapeutic about affixing glass eyes to a
dead deer or air-brushing a little natural green back onto the head of a
decapitated alligator.